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Welcome 2013, A New Year Dawns for Pascal Game Developers

It's been some time since I've done a site-wide community announcement, but I felt that I should say something to ring in the new year and let you all know that I'm still around and keeping an eye on things. In fact I've been working on a few things for the community that I'm sure will keep you excited about the coming year.

The first really big thing is that I have been in talks with RemObjects' Jim McKeeth and PP4S's Dr. Norman Morrison about getting the Oxygene for Java developer tools into classrooms. I made the introductions and asked what Marc Hoffman, RemObject's CEO and founder thought of providing some sort of educational license for a single school to start up a pilot program through the 'Pascal Programming for Schools' project. Dr. Morrison has discussed this with his own school's headmaster in England and got him interested. His school is now persuing a program with lessons designed using the new Oxygene language that would even allow them to put their projects on mobile devices right in class. Further you can now access tutorials that will be a basis for these highschool computer science classes on the PP4S website right here!

The other great piece of news is that I've started work back up on the Pascal Gamer Magazine Issue #4. I'm hoping to publish it soon with some of the articles I currently have, plus any others I can get my hands on over the next month or so. If you would like to publish a tutorial or article that you think would go great in the magazine, please feel free to contact me at Contact@pascalgamer.com! I would love to read and especially publish your article in the next issue. Thanks again and sorry for the delay for all those of you who have submitted articles and have been wondering if it went to waste. A: No it has not, and yes it will be published in Issue #4!

I'm still thinking about when to do the next PGD Challenge and what it will be. If you have any suggestions or thoughts or just want to show your interest and excitement, please let us know! Better yet, let us know when you would be best available to participate. I believe we have a discussion thread already open in the forums. If not we should create one.

I'd like to keep these competitions going so if you are interested in helping we will of course need a pair of judges to score at the end of the competition. The only prerequisite is that you have both a Mac and Windows machine and can commit to set aside some time to score all final entries. I will be using Dropbox to organize the judging process.

Want to learn more about the PGD Challenge mini game developer competitions? Read up and try past entries at www.pgdchallenge.com!

All those wandering what I've been up to, besides becoming a daddy this last September, I've been hard to work on my 2 key titles under the new Red Ant Games company; Garland's Quest and Subject 33 due out for mobiles and the OUYA gaming console. I have also been working on a comic book (or graphics novel) series that I am writing. I'll be announcing more as we get close to the completion of the first issue.

Garland's Quest will probably see a 2014 release with a crowd funding campaign sometime this year. While Subject 33 will be a much smaller project that both Paul Nicholls and I are going to push to the Android and OUYA platforms early this year. Zack Parrish is currently working on both games' soundtracks. He is a very talented musician and we are excited about his involvement in both projects.

2012 has been a good year, obvious reasons for me personally, but we have had a lot of great things happen for the community too. The new Nougat project announcement, Embarcadero's announcement of a roadmap for mobile development tools and lets not forget the epic 1.0 release of Lazarus. Let us also not forget the release of a 4th development tool, Smart Mobile Studio that will allow us to create HTML5 and JavaScript based web apps using Object Pascal code.

Add to that the exciting new OUYA console's successful kickstarter which will give many commercial opportunities for those indie game developers hoping to get their games on a REAL gaming console. So instead of another year of "more of the same," we have much new things to explore in the new year.

So with that I will end my first news post of the year. Happy coding everyone and have a very successful and fun year this 2013!

Jason McMillen
Pascal Game Development
Webmaster / Community Co-Founder

I'm going to try to keep up with the news a bit more with everything going on (S33 dev and the big GQ funding campaign) feel free to help me out as much as you can though!

Originally Posted by Sascha Willems

Great article. Hopefully 2013 will see the release of some interesting games written in Delphi and FPC, as there are several interesting projects under development right now.

Well why not create a news post about them here on PGD? I know I usually do most of the posting, and I like to keep everything nice and formatted with lots of imagry and video if possible, but that doesn't mean you guys can't get me started. Actually if I have an existing news post that has at least the key points about the project or game release, I can usually find the rest of the elements that I'd normally put into a news post. Plus it prompts me to something I might now have heard about yet.

Anyhow the more you guys help out the better PGD gets, please remember to chip in too!

The first really big thing is that I have been in talks with RemObjects' Jim McKeeth and PP4S's Dr. Norman Morrison about getting the Oxygene for Java developer tools into classrooms.

Pascal was firstly designed to be an educational language. It has a clear and elegant syntax. Nowadays the market do impose the use of C and Java that have an ugly, cryptic syntax and probably are scaring the youngers. This kind of "market decision" shows how people just follow the obvious and don't think with their own head to take his own decisions.

Well sometimes to play in a common playground you have to pick up and use what the majority is using. Sometimes not, but those are the times I enjoy most.

Oxygene for Java is unique in that it has the strengths of a language originally designed for learning, so it's easy to pickup and learn, but it also outputs 100% Java byte-code that is in no way discernible from a Java compiler's own compiled byte-code. This is great, not for the purpose of deception, but rather because it is 100% compatible and is guaranteed to execute as advertised on any Java RTE. So it's a quality product as well as having all the other aspects which make it great.

I can see it catching on, in many ways it has way more potential than the Delphi compiler.